As mild, comforting and vaguely colonial as beans on toast, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel brings together some of Britain's top-shelf acting treasures for a story of late-life awakenings and self-discovery in India. Directed by John Madden (of Shakespeare in Love and, more recently, The Debt), the film is, underneath its surface of warm fuzzies, a precision instrument aimed directly at the heart of its intended, underserved older audience.
As predictable a path as it follows, it delivers exactly what it sets out to -- a feel-good tale with equal portions of romance, tempered melancholy, transformation and low-key fish-out-of-water humor. And if the mechanics at work here are more than obvious, they're also a fair price to pay for getting to see�Bill Nighy joke with�Judi Dench about his inability to fix a telephone, Maggie Smith force down local food in order to be polite, Tom Wilkinson join in a game of pickup cricket and�Penelope Wilton look terrified during a�tuk-tuk ride.
The seven retirees in the main ensemble end up in�Jaipur, enticed by marketing materials for a hotel "for the elderly and beautiful" that turn out to be more aspirational than actual. The place is run-down, some of the rooms don't have doors and others have been taken over by wildlife -- the manager Sonny (an aggressively animated�Dev Patel) has unquashable enthusiasm but not particular skill for running a place or raising money to make much-needed fixes. Fortunately for him, most of his guests can't afford to leave -- they've outsourced their retirement to India rather than face living the rest of their lives tucked away or lauded as if they had already died.
Housewife Evelyn (Dench) is there because the husband she always trusted to take care of things has passed away and left her in debt, forcing…
Jessica Paré Jessica Simpson Zooey Deschanel Aaliyah Abbie Cornish Adriana Lima Adrianne Curry Adrianne Palicki
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